Paul's Idea of Community: Spirit and Culture in Early House Churches

By Robert J. Banks

This highly readable investigation of the early church explores the revolutionary nature, dynamics, and effects of the earliest Christian communities. It introduces readers to the cultural setting of the house churches of biblical times, examines the apostle Paul's vision of life in the Christian church, and explores how the New Testament model of community applies to Christian practice today. Updated and revised throughout, this 40th-anniversary edition incorporates recent research, updates the bibliography, and adds a new fictional narrative that depicts the life and times of the early church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781493421589

Robert J. Banks

Robert J. Banks (PhD, University of Cambridge) has taught at various universities and theological colleges in Europe, North America, and Asia. He is honorary professor at Alphacrucis College in Sydney, Australia, and adjunct professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia. He previously served as executive director of the De Pree Leadership Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.

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© 1994, 2020 by Robert J. Banks

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.bakeracademic.com

Originally published in 1979 by Anzea Publishers, Australia.

Ebook edition created 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-2158-9

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations labeled NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Contents

Cover    i

Half Title Page    ii

Title Page    iii

Copyright Page    iv

Preface to the Third Edition    vii

Preface to the Second Edition    ix

Preface to the First Edition    xi

Abbreviations    xv

Introduction    1

1. The Sociocultural and Religious Settings    5

2. The Gospel of Other-Directed Freedom    15

3. Church in Family Business Residences    25

4. Church as Present Heavenly Reality    35

5. The Community as a Loving Household    43

6. The Community as an Organic Harmony    51

7. Mutual Learning and Testing of Faith    59

8. Common Meals and Signs of Fellowship    67

9. The Sharing of Gifts and Ministry    77

10. The Interplay of Grace and Order    87

11. Unity and Diversity among the Members    95

12. The Contribution of Women in Church    103

13. Abolishing Religious Distinctions between Members    111

14. Defining Leadership by Function, Not Position    121

15. The Role of Visiting Missioners    131

16. The Link between Mission and Church    139

17. The Nature of Paul’s Authority    147

18. The Exercise of Paul’s Influence    155

Conclusion    163

Appendix 1: The Drift of the Pastorals    167

Appendix 2: Going to Church in the First Century    173

Glossary    193

Select Bibliography    197

General Index    209

Scripture and Ancient Sources Index    212

Back Cover    223

Preface to the Third Edition

I had never envisaged this modest book having such a long and useful life. It is particularly pleasing that it continues to cross the boundary between academic and general audiences, finding its way into scholarly writings, theological courses, and practitioner’s hands, as well as being appreciated by a wide range of thoughtful lay people.

This third edition is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the original edition that appeared forty years ago. It continues to provide a comprehensive account of what Paul said that is accessible to both an academic and an otherwise thoughtful audience, and not only to those who are religiously inclined but also to those more historically interested in first-century Christianity. This has affected the form of the book. It seeks not only to interpret Paul but also to set him firmly in his context. Only by placing him within his social and cultural setting, and comparing him with his contemporaries, do the genuinely distinctive elements in his approach appear. For while in many respects Paul was very much a man of his times, in other ways he was astonishingly ahead of them.

Though this is not a technical work, it is based on a thorough investigation of the relevant primary and secondary sources and offers a number of fresh interpretations of his writings. For me, interest in Paul’s view has been stimulated not only by academic study but also by involvement in groups convinced that Paul has a vital relevance to their life. We learn about the past not just by rational reflection upon it but by personal involvement in present activities that have links with it.

In formatting the footnotes and bibliography I have borne in mind those who will mainly use them. References to secondary works have been excluded to avoid unnecessarily weighing down the presentation. Instead I have provided an extensive select bibliography geared around the main themes of the book, omitting only works in foreign languages because of the wider audience the book has in view. References to less accessible sources (e.g., collections of Greek papyri or inscriptions and some rabbinic commentaries or codes) are to those editions that are more readily available. A glossary describes the main figures, works, and movements cited in the book for those who are less familiar with them.

Since the second edition of the book appeared in the early nineties, the main developments in Pauline studies have been first in social and cultural studies of Paul’s writings and period and second in works on Paul’s missionary and ecclesial endeavors. Though these social and cultural studies continue to provide varying interpretations of the actual form of Paul’s communities, they have definitely helped portray his activities. Even though they have not always produced agreement between scholars, they have helped portray what he did in more concrete and everyday terms. Meanwhile, substantial exegetical and theological treatments of Paul’s writings have continued to extend and enrich our interpretation of Paul’s thought and life. Interaction with all these recent studies of Paul has continued to inform and nuance my understanding of his ideas and practice.

I am particularly delighted that the publishers agreed to include in this volume my booklet Going to Church in the First Century. This little exercise in what is now called narrative exegesis was first written as a companion piece to Paul’s Idea of Community shortly after publication. It has also gone through several editions but until now has only ever been published separately. I have found that this storied version of the material in the larger book works with a wide range of audiences—from Sunday School classes, youth fellowships, adult Bible studies, reading groups, and seminary classes, to theological faculty—and has also been translated into several other languages, including Korean, Japanese, Danish, and German.

Robert Banks

Canberra

September 2018

Preface to the Second Edition

Although it is fifteen years since this book appeared, there seems to be a continuing demand for it. This has provided the opportunity for me to work through the text again and make various improvements. I have wanted to do this for some time.

This second edition is the result of a thoroughgoing revision. Only a few paragraphs remain completely untouched. One consequence of this is that the text reads more easily and clearly. I have also refined some of its interpretations and viewpoints so as to take into account more recent scholarly investigations of Paul’s writings and my own ongoing reflections. The bibliography has been extended and fully updated, and an index of ancient sources has been added. Indispensable in all this has been the help of Shirley A. Decker-Lucke, Assistant Academic Editor at Hendrickson Publishers. She has been everything one could hope for in an editor, and I am deeply grateful to her.

I am gratified by the continued interest in the book and trust that readers will now find it more current and accessible. The topic remains an important one, and the need to translate Paul’s views into contemporary practice is as urgent as ever.

Preface to the First Edition

This is not a technical book, nor a popular one either. We already have a number of stimulating technical works on Paul’s view of the church, and many popular books on church life build on aspects of Paul’s view in their presentation. But the former are too linguistically daunting for most readers, while the latter are too particular in their emphasis or psychological in their orientation to be fully satisfactory as treatments of Paul. I have written this for those who find themselves caught in the middle—seeking a comprehensive account of what Paul said, yet in terms they can understand. And I am not thinking of the Christianly-inclined only. Paul’s idea of community is too historically interesting and significant to be closeted among the religious.

This has affected the form of the book. It seeks not only to interpret Paul, but to set him firmly in his context. Only by comparing him with his contemporaries do the genuinely distinctive elements in his approach come into focus. For while in many respects Paul was very much a man of his times, in others he was astonishingly ahead of them. Many people today are finding that he speaks more relevantly about community than representatives of the counterculture groups and church structures. Meanwhile the sociologists of religion are beginning to discover that Paul is someone with whom they have not fully come to terms. Initially this book contained additional material for those who have such interests, but I did not have enough space to carry this through properly. Still, those who wish to explore further the sociological character of Paul’s ideas will find here much that is helpful. And those seeking a more precise identification of the culturally conditioned and permanently relevant aspects of his thought will discover much to help them. At a later stage I hope to give more concentrated attention to these two areas.

Though this is not a technical work, it is based on a thorough investigation of the relevant primary and secondary sources, and suggests a number of new interpretations of the material involved. My first inquiries were made more than fifteen years ago, and in varying degrees the subject has preoccupied me ever since. Almost five years have passed since a first draft of part of this book was completed, and it has gone through many revisions before reaching its present form. For me, interest in Paul’s view has been stimulated not only by reading and thinking about it at an academic level, but also by involvement in groups which feel what Paul said still has continuing relevance for their community life. We learn about the past not just by rational reflection upon it, but also by personal involvement in those aspects of our present which have common links with it. This is true not only for people in general but for those of us who are historians as well. It sharpens the questions we ask of the past and deepens our empathy with it. Since the book does contain several new lines of thought, sets Paul’s ideas in a broader historical context than is customary and approaches him as a social thinker rather than a systematic theologian, I hope it will be read by some biblical scholars, ancient historians and historians of ideas, as well as those for whom it is chiefly designed.

In setting out the footnotes and bibliography I have borne in mind those who will mainly use them. References to secondary works have been excluded from footnotes to avoid unnecessarily weighting the presentation. Instead I have provided a carefully chosen bibliography, geared around the main themes of the book. This includes works supporting in more detail many lines of argument within it, broader treatments of various aspects of Paul’s view and alternative views to those I have advocated. Certain references to primary sources will be found for convenience in the text but longer sets of references will generally be found in the footnotes. Citations are comprehensive as far as Paul’s writings are concerned. Other contemporary documents are cited representatively, since here I am summarizing bodies of evidence rather than treating them exhaustively. In view of the relative inaccessibility of some sources, e.g., collections of Greek papyri and inscriptions and some rabbinic commentaries and codes, I have referred only to those which the general reader will find more readily available. Those specialists who wish to consult the more technical sources should not have any difficulty finding the required references. These are in the books mentioned in the bibliography accompanying each chapter. However, where more inaccessible items have been gathered into anthologies such as C. K. Barrett’s collection of background documents to the New Testament, I have included reference to them. At the close of the book there is also a glossary containing descriptions of the main figures, works, and movements cited in the text and footnotes for those who may be unfamiliar with them.

I have appreciated the encouragement of various people in the writing of this book, too many unfortunately to name. But I must thank Donald Robinson, now Archbishop of Sydney, who in his lectures some years ago first opened my eyes to some of the distinctive features of Paul’s view of church; and my good friend Geoffrey Moon who, in countless discussions, has stimulated and sharpened my thinking on many issues involved. Thanks are also due to John Waterhouse, at the time Manager of Anzea Publishers, for convincing me of the need for a more general work on the subject rather than yet another technical monograph, and also for carefully editing the original manuscript. I have also valued the way in which Mr. B. Howard Mudditt, until lately the Managing Director of Paternoster Press, maintained constant interest in the project. The editors of Interchange and the Journal of Christian Education freely agreed to my using some paragraphs from articles on Paul and Women’s Liberation (Interchange 18 [1975]: 81–105) and Freedom and Authority in Education—I: Paul’s View of Freedom; II: Paul’s View of Authority (Journal of Christian Education 55 [1976]: 40–48; 56 [1976]: 17–24). Edwin A. Judge, Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University, and James D. G. Dunn, Lecturer in New Testament at Nottingham University, kindly read the final draft and made a number of helpful suggestions.

I am also grateful to Stephen Barton and Peter Marshall, two of my postgraduate students, for correcting the initial typescript, and to Dr. Robert Withycombe, Warden of St. Mark’s Institute, Canberra, and to the Rev. David Durie, Principal of the College of Ministry, Canberra, for helping me check the final proofs. Encouragement and help of a more personal kind were given by Audrey Duncan throughout the years it took to write. My wife Julie helped me clarify many basic ideas in our frequent discussions of the book’s contents and also assisted me in checking the manuscript. Our children, Mark and Simon, patiently bore with it all and will, I hope, one day understand more fully how Paul could so grip one’s imagination—as for me he does.

Abbreviations

Old Testament

New Testament

Old Testament Apocrypha

Pseudepigrapha

Dead Sea Scrolls

Philo

Josephus

Mishnah

Tosefta

Pesiqta

Classical Authors

APULEIUS

ARISTOPHANES

CICERO

CLEANTHES

DIO CHRYSOSTOM

DIOGENES LAERTIUS

EPICTETUS

LIVY

LUCIAN

MARCUS AURELIUS

MUSONIUS RUFUS

OVID

PHILOSTRATUS

PLATO

PLINY

PLUTARCH

PROCLUS

SALLUST

SENECA

TACITUS

THUCYDIDES

TIBULLUS

XENOPHON

Patristic Writings

EUSEBIUS

JUSTIN MARTYR

ORIGEN

Miscellaneous

Introduction

The Christian writings of the first century reflect a variety of attitudes toward the meaning and practice of community. But it is the earliest among them, Paul’s letters, that contain the most detailed information. The remainder deal with the matter only intermittently, or in an indirect way, or are too brief to yield any rounded portrait. Though virtually all of them were composed later than Paul’s writings, they sometimes preserve traces of an approach to community that precedes his writings. Paul was not the first to formulate a Christian idea of community. But there can be no doubt that he gave more attention to this than anyone else during the first century. In every one of his writings, aspects of community life come in for discussion, and in a few it emerges as the main issue for consideration.

It is not merely the extent of Paul’s contribution that sets it apart from others in the first century but its quality. We find here the most clearly developed and profound understanding of community in all the early Christian writings. Not that he provides any systematic treatment of the idea. For the most part he worked out his views in response to the problems of particular communities. Only a few of his writings were designed for a wider audience and deal with the subject in more general terms. Even these do not display a strictly systematic mind at work. But they do reveal an energetic and creative thinker who has the ability to engage in both theoretical reflection and the subtleties of argument. His writings also reveal someone unfailingly concerned with the practical consequences of his viewpoint and personally involved in the actual outcome of his recommendations.

Until the last century, and in some conservative circles up to the present time, the dogmatic approach to the NT tended to result in a monochrome treatment of its contents. This meant that the views of even highly individual authors like Paul were too often interpreted by statements contained in the writings of other early Christian figures. It also meant that the possibility of development in his views over a period of time was rarely given serious consideration. The emergence of a more historical approach to the NT rightly queried both of these procedures. But the first reassessments of Paul produced by this historical approach severed him too drastically from his first-century Christian contemporaries and reduced too arbitrarily the number of writings alleged to come from his hand. These initial experiments in the reevaluation of Paul have been generally rejected as unsound in both their methodology and their conclusions. More moderate assessments have come to prevail, recognizing the links between Paul’s interpretation of Christianity and that of others in the NT and extending the number of letters felt to come from his pen.

The distinctiveness of Paul’s contribution is encountered nowhere more so, I would argue, than in his idea of community. In the detailed exploration of his writings that follows, we will look at key aspects of his approach, taking care to note how he arrives at and argues from the basic principles that underlie his understanding. Two comments should be made here. First, it is the internal dynamics of Paul’s communities that we are chiefly concerned with investigating, not the external life of their members. The latter would require a full-scale treatment of its own. In any case, for Paul it is not as a community but as individuals, families, and small groups that Christians mostly undertake and fulfill their responsibilities. Second, since the various aspects of his approach are based on what he regards as the fundamental reality around which everything, including his own life, revolves—the gospel—certain themes are bound to reappear throughout this study. Paul’s thinking about community cannot be compared to an argument that proceeds logically from one point to another, each stage containing the seeds of the next and unfolding naturally into it. It is more like a composition built upon a single underlying motif, each section providing a variation of this basic theme, with the motif itself resurfacing at various points in the work. We shall encounter this pattern many times in the following pages.

This investigation is primarily based on Paul’s letters. Although some uncertainty surrounds the genuineness of Ephesians—a general letter to a broad group of Christians rather than a message to a specific church—I have decided to include it as originally coming from the apostle. The so-called Pastoral Letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, pose a more complex problem since their authenticity continues to be questioned even by some conservative scholars. While no one doubts that they emanated from circles deeply influenced by Paul, they contain a number of uncharacteristic features that suggest, like Luke’s reconstructions of Paul’s speeches in Acts, they were compiled later. While I continue to consider them part of the canonical Christian writings, I have discussed them separately at the close of the book, where their compatibility or incompatibility with what is drawn from the other writings is left for the reader to gauge. Since Luke’s general trustworthiness in historical matters continues to gain credibility, I have also included material from Acts relating to Paul’s activities in founding his communities. I take the probable order of composition of Paul’s letters to be 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon, followed by Ephesians1—all of them written within a comparatively short period of time (ca. AD 50/51–61/62).

1. Scripture references in footnotes are normally cited in this order.

1

The Sociocultural and Religious Settings

Paul: A Man of His Times

It is not possible to understand people and their activities apart from the times in which they live. This is especially the case with Paul. In responding to the call of Jesus, he did not withdraw from the world about him; rather he found himself thrown more violently into it. As a consequence he crisscrossed vast tracts of the Mediterranean region several times in the course of thirty years. In doing so, he met people from a variety of racial and national backgrounds, among them Jews from the Dispersion, homeland and immigrant Greeks, Romans at the heart of the Empire, Cypriots and Macedonians, local inhabitants in different parts of Asia Minor, and even small groups from Egypt, Crete, Malta, and Scythia. On these travels, he encountered competing philosophical schools, particularly Stoicism and Epicureanism, and alternative religious traditions from traditional Greek city-state cults and imported Oriental mystery religions. At different points in his journeys he also came into conflict with a wide range of civil and political authorities and experienced firsthand the repercussions of various legal processes and judgments. In these ways Paul was extensively involved in, and affected by, significant tendencies and tensions of his day, and he cannot be studied in isolation from them.

There is a further reason for insisting that Paul be approached in this way. He did not merely encounter the ideas and institutions of the people among whom he moved; he engaged with them and developed a variety of responses to them. Depending on their character and his context, at times he accommodated them, at times opposed them, at times transformed them, and at